Innovations in Vendor Management Systems: Part 3

For those of you who have been reading our series on “Innovations in Vendor Management Systems (VMS)” Part 3 is here! This week, we are taking a look at how the Sourcing Industry Group (SIG) evaluated PRO’s Wand, VMSUser Experience, and Integration capabilities.

We only have two posts left in this series – be sure to check back soon! Missed Part 1 or Part 2? No worries, you can easily catch up by a simple click of the mouse.

Two Areas of a VMS that Matter

User Experience

For PRO, the overall User Experience combined with robust, useful functionality ultimately drives user engagement and adoption. Extensive user research determined that the functionality most often used by managers is request creation, candidate review, and time/expense approval. This user research is then combined with the Design team’s core principles of Usability, Mobility, Analytics, and Consumerism. The Wand UI is very intuitive and action driven. It tells the manager what to do next. It is also contextual where actions are identified only if appropriate.

The award-winning Mobile apps allow managers and workers to engage with the VMS anytime, anywhere which drives acceptance in a program.

Extensive intuitive dashboards include all aspects of candidates, existing workforce, rates, dates, spend, compliance, and status. Two separate platforms are available. The core Wand platform has Operational and Transactional real-time data. The Wand Discovery BI platform is designed for executives, client sponsors, or their delegates to manage their program on any KPI or Metric desired.

Customized dashboards contain all global data. Within three clicks, a user can drill down to the transaction level. For example, the Global Spend Dashboard contains the overall global spend displayed in any KPI or Metric. Three clicks later, a user can see an individual contractor’s rate, supplier, and length of service.

To support candidate management, the Wand platform utilizes an advanced Parsing Engine to deconstruct all job descriptions and resumes. The engine creates a Candidate Profile in Wand. For supplier candidates, the supplier can edit the profile if necessary.

For the YS (Your Source) Talent Network, the candidates themselves can edit their profile. When a manager is looking for candidates, the advanced Wand Search & Match technology uses sophisticated algorithms to determine the best match. The Manager sees a dashboard containing the highest percent matches at the top.

New market data is provided real-time in the Wand platform as it becomes available. Client Sponsors can use this information to modify the configurable controls they have in place about maximum rate per role (e.g., warning, error, or routing for approval with justification). Wand tracks and measures all historical rate behavior and provides predictive analytics on the future of the market. Many clients also import employee data in Wand Discovery and perform global Total Talent Management on where and what percent of their human capital will be contingent.

Wand provides extensive alerts, notifications, and messages to its users to optimize their time in the system. The most beneficial notifications are on mobile devices for the iPhone, Android phones, iPad, and Apple Watch. Since all of these apps are 100% native, it allows the user a rich experience with notifications.

Without being logged on, users receive a “badge” (similar to a text message) on top of the app’s icon displayed on the mobile device. The user then logs onto Wand Mobile and approves that urgent Change Order, new position, or reviews that rare Hadoop architect. These notifications are configurable by the user. When a user logs onto Wand, the home page notifies the manager of everything she needs to do. Each action item is clearly identified with status and next steps. Alerts and notifications are visualized by bright, graphical icons making the user aware of an ending assignment, depleted funds, overtime, new candidates, etc.

Finally, the Wand platform has embedded business intelligence. A user can click on the “Help Me Decide” button which will trigger a serious of questions. Depending on the answers, Wand will recommend the best engagement model.

Integrations

PRO’s Wand was engineered to feature an open architecture that offers the flexibility to allow for easy and efficient creation of data integrations with any commercial or proprietary platform. Wand accommodates a host of industry-standard integration methods including SOAP, REST and delimited files. Wand has numerous integrations with Workday, SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Clarity, and many other systems.

Wand is capable of sending and receiving data using secure SFTP and web services. PRO has a complete set of robust documentation detailing integration standards and protocols including connection information and schemas for the exchange of data.

Every client is assigned a unique, secure username and password. These credentials are valid only for use with integrations/data feeds and do not allow for any other Wand access.

If you or a member of your team would benefit from a further discussion or a demo of Wand, please contact a PRO representative at 800.291.1099 or email at info@prounlimited.com.

Disclaimer: The content in this blog post is for informational purposes only and cannot be construed as specific legal advice or as a substitute for legal advice. The blog post reflects the opinion of PRO Unlimited and is not to be construed as legal solutions and positions. Contact an attorney for specific advice and guidance for specific issues or questions.